Valuation and Desire FULL DRAFT A

115 Pages·2012·15.67 MB·English

by  Elizabeth L. Bennett

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Made the Amish Modern
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hg8w238
Author
Bennett, Elizabeth Louise
Publication Date
2012

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California
Economies of Valuation and Desire:
How New Deal Photography Made the Amish Modern

By

Elizabeth Louise Bennett

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

History of Art

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Margaretta M. Lovell, Chair
Professor Bryan J. Wolf
Professor Elizabeth A. Honig
Professor Richard Hutson

Spring 2012
!
1
Abstract

Economies of Valuation and Desire:
How New Deal Photography Made the Amish Modern

by

Elizabeth Louise Bennett

Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Margaretta M. Lovell, Chair

“Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Made the Amish Modern” connects
two substantial bodies of scholarship: the visual culture of the New Deal, and twentieth-century visual
and literary representations of religious sub-cultures in the United States. Its primary objectives are two-
fold. First, it provides an alternative model for the Great Depression as a historical narrative and
popular concept in the American imagination. The images at the center of my dissertation propose a
counter-narrative to those typically offered, which describe great waves of migration across the landscape
– narratives of Okies, and other de-territorialized American identities moving through shifting
topographies of loss and renewal. In contrast, the earliest group of photographs to depict consenting
Amish subjects in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania make visible an American community’s firm
rootedness to a particular place, and moreover, the cost of that endurance to other citizens. Second, the
project contributes to the field of Anabaptist Studies a critical assessment of twentieth-century
photographs of the photography-averse Amish, a subject that has yet to receive consideration in any
field. Since they arose as a distinct group within the Amish Church in 1865, the Old Order have
exercised serious proscriptions against photography as both act and object. Yet images of Amish
individuals have proliferated in American visual culture since the early twentieth century and contribute
to our collective idea of the community as insular, old-fashioned, and curiously benign. A particular set
of New Deal photographs act as a pivot point in a history of picturing the Old Order – they are
paradoxical images because they present the Anabaptist community as nearly extinct on the periphery of
the modern world, yet also a viable threat to central tenets of multiple modernisms. Furthermore, it is
precisely the Old Order’s particular objections to photography that constitute some of the most serious
challenges to established ideas of Modernism.

“Economies of Valuation and Desire” considers photographs by Irving Rusinow taken for the American
Farm Community Study, a sociological research endeavor directed by the Bureau of Agricultural
Economics from 1938 to 1942. As the Bureau’s Head Field Photographer, the little-known Rusinow
replaced Dorothea Lange, who left in 1940 to pursue work on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Study
was comprised of six rural communities, including the Lancaster Amish, that the Bureau’s team of
sociologists selected as representative of the nation’s rural inhabitants. In 1941, Rusinow produced
about 1,000 photographs of these communities; however, only 76 of them were published with the
Study’s technical reports between 1942 and 1945. The project investigates a small portion of the
photographer’s (published and unpublished) images within the context of the Study’s ultimate objective:
to structure the six communities into a legible “continuum of stability and instability” and in the process,
uncover cultural, environmental, and agricultural variables that led to a community’s economic success
2
or failure. The Community Study was in the service of the Bureau’s primary program, Federal-County
Land-Use Planning; the second half of the chapter considers the possibilities of Rusinow’s photographs
for this larger program. Land-Use Planning facilitated direct dialogue between all agricultural
stakeholders in order to propose and enact policy change. Bureau-organized municipal meetings
brought together farmers, university agriculture extension agents, social scientists, Washington
bureaucrats, and farm union representatives who collaborated to literally redraw maps of local
topographies as the first step towards higher agricultural profits and more economically resilient
communities. Land-Use Planning was tasked with inculcating big business methods into agriculture, but
doing so with a grassroots democratic approach that required “inside” information about each of the
communities in question. To this end, Rusinow’s camera was the program’s fundamental research tool,
freely oscillating between ethnographic and anthropological looking at (O)ther Americans. His
photographs substantially reframe established narratives about the New Deal; they muddy (or
unexpectedly illuminate) Roy Stryker’s assertion that the most famous government photography project,
enabled by the Farm Security Administration, was going to “introduce America to Americans.” I argue
that Land-Use Planning photography was deployed as a mode of surveillance in the countryside, a tool
for social gardening with which the vulnerabilities of peripheral populations could be identified, ordered,
and “corrected.”

!
i
Table of Contents

Introduction
The Amish Bernie Madoff ii

Chapter One
Lange’s Replacement 1

Chapter Two
Last West 14

Chapter Three
Economies of Valuation 27

Chapter Four
Economies of Desire 36

Postscript
Picturing Amish Forgiveness 48

Figures 53

Bibliography 98

Appendix A 103
Terms

Appendix B 104
Government Organizations
ii
Introduction
The Amish Bernie Madoff

This postcard from a gentler and simpler America is about as unlikely a place imaginable for
the news that broke in September: one of Sugarcreek’s own, a prominent member of what
some people here call the Plain Community, was under arrest, accused by federal
prosecutors of running a Ponzi scheme that betrayed his neighbors’ trust and wiped out
more than $16 million of their savings.1

They are calling him the Amish Bernie Madoff. His real name is Monroe Beachy; he is a seventy-
one-year-old Beachy Amish man; he lives in Sugarcreek, Ohio; and he stands accused of directing a
Ponzi scheme that targeted his Amish and Mennonite neighbors in Tuscarawas County, the
southern border of the largest Amish population in the United States. As readers, we are also struck
by the “unlikeliness” of the place for such a news story to break. Sugarcreek, a village “as sweet as
its name,” is home to just over 2,000 residents: “The Little Switzerland of Ohio” because of its
robust Anabaptist presence.2 Ponzi schemes seem too cynical, complicated, and specific to occur in
“this postcard from a gentler and simpler America.”3 We are shocked and upset when what we
perceive as the worst parts of our modern society infiltrate these pockets of pastness in the
countryside. Since the early twentieth century, the Amish in northeastern Ohio and Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania have embodied this Other America. We call each of these places “Amish
Country,” a term that both defines its geographic boundaries and designates it as separate from
every place else – the United States but suspended in an earlier time.

But the Amish Bernie Madoff is not an historical enigma; and the Amish are neither strangers to the
complexities of capitalism nor unskilled in the art of entrepreneurial exploits. They are shrewd
businessmen and enterprising farmers whose territory has rapidly expanded since the early twentieth
century, and whose numbers, in the past four years, have continued to increase annually by 5%. In
2010, the Amish had established communities in twenty-eight states as far west as Montana, South
Dakota, and Colorado. Their total North American population is now nearly 250,000 individuals;
and if their growth continues at this rate, they will double that number by 2024.4 The Amish have
prospered during the so-called “Great Recession,” what many economists call the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many Americans continue to experience ongoing
hardships precipitated from the late 2000s financial crisis that resulted in the collapse of large
financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments and downturns in stock markets
around the world. In many parts of the country, the housing market also suffered, resulting in
numerous evictions, foreclosures and prolonged unemployment. In this context of American
economic hardship, the speed of Amish population growth and the geographic reach of their
communities are staggering. They are literally forging new western frontiers – pioneers of Amish
Country. These growth trends are not the marks of a simple static people; but rather, they indicate a
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
1 Diana B. Henriques. “Broken Trust in God’s Country.” The New York Times. February 25, 2012.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/business/in-amish-country-accusations-of-a-ponzi-scheme.html). Accessed 25
February 2012. Henriques, a veteran financial reporter for the New York Times, also wrote “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie
Madoff and the Death of Trust” (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Jeff Martin. “Amish Population Growing, Heading West.” USA Today. September 14, 2011. Source of statistics: Young
Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, PA.
(http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-09-14-amish-population_N.html) Accessed 16 February 2012.
iii
thriving population with economically robust communities. The pages that follow consider the
circumstances around the first time that the Amish looked Modern to mainstream Americans.

Chapter Sequence and Concerns
“Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Made the Amish Modern”
focuses on a period more than a half century ago and connects two substantial bodies of
scholarship: the visual culture of the New Deal, and twentieth-century visual and literary
representations of religious sub-cultures in the United States. Its primary objectives are two-fold.
First, it provides an alternative model for the Great Depression as a historical narrative and popular
concept. The images at the center of this project propose a counter-narrative to those typically
offered, which describe great waves of migration across the landscape – narratives of Okies, and
other de-territorialized Americans moving through shifting topographies of loss and renewal. In
contrast, the earliest group of photographs to depict consenting Amish subjects in Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania makes visible an American community’s firm rootedness to a particular place,
and suggests the cost of that endurance to other citizens. Second, the project contributes to the
field of Anabaptist Studies a critical assessment of twentieth-century photographs of the
photography-averse Amish, a subject that has yet to receive consideration in any field. Since they
arose as a distinct group within the Amish Church in 1865, the Old Order have exercised serious
proscriptions against photography as both act and object. Yet images of Amish individuals have
proliferated in American visual culture since the early twentieth century and contribute to collective
ideas of the community as insular, old-fashioned, and curiously benign. New Deal photographs act
as a pivot point in a history of picturing the Old Order – they are paradoxical images because they
present the Anabaptist community as nearly extinct on the periphery of the modern world, yet also a
viable threat to central tenets of multiple modernisms.

In May 2009, I serendipitously came upon the archives of Irving Rusinow, who, like hundreds of
other photographers employed by the government in the 1930s and 40s, have gone missing in the
historical record. I tracked down the photographer’s stepson Jeff Rusinow after he posted one of
Irving’s earliest short films that had been produced for the government in the 1950s. Jeff led me to
Susan (Rusinow) Braverman who graciously invited me to her Bethesda, Maryland home where she
lives with her husband Mark and son Jacob. Before dinner one May evening, she led me to a closet
in her home that was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of her father’s photographs, films, and
writings. It was the Holy Grail of graduate school. Since then I have been working with the
Bravermans, Jeff Rusinow, Terry Rusinow (Irving’s second daughter), and Kim Rusinow (the
photographer’s second wife) to sort, organize, and record all of the photographer’s materials in
preparation for proper archival storage at an institution in the Washington D.C. area. In many ways
then, this project is a recovery mission both of a little known New Deal photographer and of his
pictures of a misunderstood American community.

Chapter One, “Lange’s Replacement,” utilizes the materials found in the Rusinow archive in
Bethesda and constitutes the first recounting of the photographer’s earliest work as a government
employee. It is largely biographical in scope, beginning with studio work as a portrait photographer
in New Jersey, then considering his first assignments in the American Southwest for the Soil
Conservation Service, and ending with the photographs he took in Virginia for the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics before he replaced Dorothea Lange as Head Field Photographer and
executed his most well-known series for the Bureau’s Community Stability-Instability Study. In
charting a very short period in his early private and public sector career (roughly 1935-40), the
chapter has two primary objectives. First, it seeks to explain how a little known twenty-six-year-old
iv
photographer from New Jersey earned the opportunity to fill the professional shoes of Dorothea
Lange, one of America’s most famous photographers already in 1935. Second, I offer a model of
how New Deal photographers “were made.” The 1930s and 40s in the United States constitutes a
watershed in a history of photography because the government employed so many photographers
and tasked them with only documenting: people, programs, life on the rural and urban peripheries of
mainstream America. Irving Rusinow is only one photographer, however, his work and professional
movement between New Deal departments illuminates how the administration viewed the camera as
a tool for research and as an instrument of public policy.

After situating Rusinow within a larger context of New Deal philosophies, goals, and methods for
photography in Chapter One, the remaining chapters zoom in on his work for the Community
Stability-Instability Study. By refocusing our lens ever more precisely on his photographs to
eventually linger on his images of the Amish, I demonstrate how unexpectedly complicated these
Amish pictures are in the context of the New Deal project. Scholars have spent time articulating
why and how twentieth-century representations of the Amish work to domesticate the sect in order
to meet changing ideological needs of mainstream publics.5%%%There has been little scholarship,
however, that ascribes representations of the Amish, and other American sub-cultures, with value
beyond the ideological. Rusinow’s photographs are the earliest to describe the community as a
viable template for rural American economies. But we shall see that both the conditions for
Rusinow’s presence in the community (e.g. Amish woman were unavailable as subjects for his
camera) and the specific questions driving the Community Study itself required that the
photographer reconcile, what I call, problems of visibility.

We engage the first of these problems in Chapter Two, “Last West.” In this chapter, our driving
questions include, what does community look like? And how does a photograph signal stability?
The problem of visibility here hinges upon how these terms – community and stability – were
deployed and executed by the New Deal Department of Agriculture. I argue that the USDA was in
the business of both building communities according to utopian visions with a nineteenth-century
pedigree, as well as studying existing stable communities in order to learn the conditions for their
survival in an economic depression. Following from the first chapter in which we were introduced
to Rusinow as Dorothea Lange’s replacement, our two primary sets of objects in Chapter Two are
photographs by Lange of Jersey Homesteads, one of these experimental communities built by the
USDA’s Subsistence Homestead’s Division, and Rusinow’s photographs for the Community Study,
one of the most notable sociological studies about community undertaken during the New Deal. I
argue that there were vast discrepancies between the information yielded from studies of existing
communities and the information applied in the building of new ones; in short, while community
studies looked backwards in the hope of identifying a better way of life, community building projects
looked forward to a utopian future when agrarianism and industrialism might comfortably coexist.
Despite such discrepancies, however, Chapter Two offers an alternative to the dominant narrative of
the Great Depression: instead of a period of migration, the Great Depression, in both history and
myth, was also a story of tremendous stasis, of a desire to remain, retain, and reimagine one’s own
place.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
5 Some recent books that have considered how the Amish have appeared in American popular culture include, David
Weaver-Zercher. The Amish in the American Imagination. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press University, 1993); and
Donald Kraybill, David Weaver-Zercher, and Steven Nolt. Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
v
The Bureau’s Community Study concluded that the Lancaster Old Order Amish represented the
“most stable” rural American community; correspondingly, Rusinow’s pictures root the Amish to a
specific place by describing the richness and permanence of their hand-built environment as well as
the community’s full participation in Lancaster’s economy. Chapters Three and Four, “Economies
of Valuation” and “Economies of Desire” respectively, constitute a two-part examination of
Rusinow’s Amish pictures. As I demonstrate in Chapter Two, these images are unprecedented
partly because they ascribe widely applicable economic value to representations of the Amish as
opposed to earlier images that largely functioned only ideologically. Both of these chapters consider
the specificities of value – agricultural, political, and economic – that his photographs ascribe to
local Amish economies and the requisite cost of the community’s stability to other Americans.

Chapter Three engages Rusinow’s images of Amish farmsteads, or economies of valuation: male
economic spheres in which the value of things (land, farm structures, work animals, social standing
within the community) is constituted by competition between Amish and english (the Amish term for
non-Amish) as both consumer and laborer. Particularly in regards to farmsteads, the Bureau wanted
to better understand the process by which the Amish were buying up abandoned english (mostly
Scotch-Irish) farms and rehabilitating them to expand their own operations. Rusinow’s photographs
demonstrate this process of Amish expansion by way of comparison between new, sturdy Amish
structures and dilapidating english buildings abandoned by victims of the Depression. The
relationship between image and text is central to the discussion, and I consider both the captions
that accompanied Rusinow’s images (not written by the photographer but rather, an anthropologist
involved in the Study), and a contemporaneous diary of a Bureau employee who worked in the
Amish community for a week as a farmhand. By closely reading text with image I demonstrate how
tightly bound are issues of value with issues of proximity – geographic, temporal, material, personal,
prosaic. With their captions, Rusinow’s images of farmsteads situate the origins of valuation not on
the face of the thing in need of estimation – the barn or the house – rather, it reveals value as being
interstitially located in the gaps between things.

The project’s fourth and final chapter explores “economies of desire,” public and private spaces of
female production, sale, display, and acquisition. This chapter focuses on Rusinow’s photographs of
the selling floor of the city of Lancaster’s Southern Market and the unpeopled domestic interiors of
Mennonite homes in the County. At the time of production in 1941, Rusinow only had the Amish
leadership’s permission to photograph men in the Lancaster community; therefore, these
photographs of female spaces point to the presence of women metonymically via objects. Like his
images of male economic realms in the Amish community, these images “work” through multiple
visual displacements of bodies and information. I argue that Rusinow’s photographs of the public
market and the private home visually enact the social processes by which peripheral identity has
been historically constituted. Just as Amish women are only present in Rusinow’s images by way of
their relationship to objects and bodies visible in the photograph, so too have historically peripheral
identities been contingent upon their relative positions to a pervasive dominant.

Until 1976, when the Amish won the right to legally educate their children in accordance with their
religious beliefs, government officials routinely arrived at Amish schools to forcibly transport
students to public institutions. Photographs of these occurrences are unexpectedly disorienting
because they are so viscerally affecting. For example, the cover of a Des Moines, Iowa newspaper in
1967 shows the backs of three Amish boys running for a cornfield behind their school to evade
capture. These kinds of photographs transform the little red schoolhouse into a site of violence and
rupture in the later twentieth century, and are eerily premonitory of the photographs surrounding